Wednesday, 9 April 2014

A-Z Blogging Challenge - Holocaust Memorials

During my visits to Germany and Poland, I have visited
several concentration camps. Some people think these places should be
obliterated, but personally I think they act as a memorial to the millions who
lost their lives here during World War Two. I’ve visited different ones at
different times, but always found them a sobering reminder of man’s inhumanity.

The first camp I visited was Auschwitz-Birkenau, and I will
never forget my first sight of the watchtower and the arch through which the ‘transports’
passed into the camp.

The sheer size of the camp was mind-blowing too, stretching nearly a mile into the distance to where the gas chambers were situated (and have now been demolished).

It was a beautiful spring day when I first visited Auschwitz, and somehow that didn't seem right. You tend to imagine the camp in monochrome because of the photos you've seen, but when I was part way down this rail track, we heard a train's hooter somewhere in the distance, and the hairs on my neck stood on end.

The Auschwitz Labour Camp (as distinct from Birkenau, the
death camp) was a couple of miles away, and again the entrance seemed only too
familiar, with the inscription ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (work makes you free). The
barrack blocks that housed the workers were surrounded by electric fences, and the displays of suitcases, shoes, pots and pans, steel-rimmed spectacles, prayer shawls (and Zyklon B cyanide canisters) in one of the blocks were heartrending, reminding you of all the people who lost their lives here.

There is very little left of the Bergen-Belsen camp, near to
the town of Celle in Northern Germany, apart from the mass graves and various
memorials.

This is the Jewish memorial, which reads: ‘Israel and the world
shall remember 30,000 Jews exterminated in the concentration camp of Bergen
Belsen at the hands of the murderous Nazis.’ It was erected on April 15, 1946, the
first anniversary of the liberation of the camp. There is another memorial that
commemorates the camp’s other victims – gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses,
and political opponents of the Nazis.

One memorial at Belsen attracts especial attention – that of
Anne Frank and her sister Margot, who both died there about a month before the
camp was liberated. The long mound in the background (left centre of the photo)
is one of the mass graves.

Sachsenhausen Camp, near Berlin, was established in 1936,
was mainly a transit camp, and also a training camp for S.S. officers who were
then deployed to other camps. Between 1936 and 1945, about 200,000 people
passed through the camp, and about 100,000 died there as a result of
exhaustion, disease, malnutrition or because of brutal medical experimentation.
The gate to the camp had the usual ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ words.

In the large roll-call area, now with a memorial wall denoting
the shapes of the barrack buildings, there were shoe-testing tracks – areas
with different surfaces, gravel, cinders, large stones etc. Prisoners had to
march round these all day, testing the soles of army boots to see what type
performed the best.

Finally, Dachau Camp, near Munich, which was established in
1933, shortly after Hitler came to power, was a camp for political prisoners.
Over 200,000 from all over Europe were imprisoned here, and more than 43,000 of
them died. The barrack blocks were designed to hold 200 prisoners but, by the end of the war, each barrack was catastrophically overcrowded with up to 2,000 people.

'Arbeit Macht Frei' takes on a bitter and tragic meaning, as a result.

All these sites remind us of an atrocity that should never be forgotten.

There is something morbid about a concentration camp. Germany is not the only ones that had them. We all had them, Canada and U.S. Japan, we all had them during the war. Some still have them, now called refugee camps.

Thank you for a reminder of what we should never forget. I've been to Holocaust Museums and find the silence of these places to be eery. The last time I went to the Washington DC museum, I got so upset that I decided I would never go back. My son has been to Auschwitz. After the visit, his black friend was harassed by ignorant Poles at a soccer game. Just a reminder that it's not over.

Our son Abram visited Auschwitz on a trip after his senior year of school. It became a haunting memory for him. When he was younger, we visited the Washington DC museum and he followed the adult track with us. His "person" was a homosexual (Abram came out a few years after). The mix of the two was memorials was life changing for him.

Sachsenhausen Camp 2009; it touched my life. I took a picture of myself standing next to one of the largest trees I could find. It was weird thinking how that tree was there to see all those atrocities during those years and then on one particular day in the summer of '09...me.